The invention relates to transducers, and particularly to non-contact optical torque sensing.
In many applications of mechanical engineering, it is desired to measure strain or loads without physical contact. Whenever physical contact is permissible, a conventional electrical strain gauge is normally used. In some applications, such as sensing torque in a rotating shaft, physical contact is difficult and optical means of sensing torque may be utilized. Prior art non-contact, optical means for load and torque sensing have a low accuracy and a low sensitivity, particularly when the sensing device cannot be mounted sufficiently close to the object being measured. By using an interferometric principle with sub-cycle resolution, the present invention can measure movements below one nanometer from large distances, allowing accurate and sensitive load and torque measurement. The only part requiring contact with the object being measured is a label carrying an embossed diffraction grating. Such labels, being thin and light, do not affect the object being measured. The negligible mass of such a label, typically made of a thin plastic sheet, is particularly important when measuring torque in a rapidly rotating shaft, as any mass affecting the balancing of the shaft cannot be tolerated. This is particularly important in measuring torque in high-speed turbines and engines as well as miniature devices Interferometric principles have been used in shaft encoders, where motion of the grating creates a xe2x80x9cbeatxe2x80x9d frequency (due to an optical Doppler effect) proportional to the surface velocity. In one embodiment of the present invention, this xe2x80x9cbeatxe2x80x9d frequency is intentionally ignored and only the phase difference between two reflected beams is measured, thus the measured torque value is independent of the speed of rotation. One limitation of the prior art techniques, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,525,068 (xe2x80x9cMannavaxe2x80x9d) for example, is that they have limited measurement sensitivity, because they involve non-interferometric methods or interferometric methods only capable of counting an integer number of fringes. A second advantage of the invention over prior art is the ability to provide a very high sensitivity and a very wide torque measuring range in a single device, without requiring the generation of very high frequencies. These advantages allow the present invention to be used even at very high shaft speeds.
An interferometric optical torque sensor accurately senses the torque transmitted by a rotating shaft without requiring physical contact with the shaft. A thin flexible diffraction grating is bonded to the shaft with grating lines parallel to the shaft, A laser beam is split in two and reflected from two axially-separated points of the grating. As the shaft twists, the phase of the light in the diffracted orders of the light reflected from the grating will change. By superimposing the reflected beams, an interference pattern is created. The motion of the interference fringes in this pattern is proportional to the twist and, therefore, the torque in the shaft. The use of an interferometric principle allows high sensitivity. The use of collimated sensing beams allows a large gap between the sensing device and the shaft. The measured torque is independent of this gap and is independent of the rotational speed of the shaft. The power transmitted by the shaft may be computed from the torque and shaft speed.